The qualifying offers — one year for $17.4 million — will ensure some level of compensation should Hosmer, Moustakas or Cain sign elsewhere. All three players are expected to decline the offer and search for a multi-year contract on the open market. The size of those deals will dictate what kind of compensation the Royals receive in return.

Compensation rules under the latest collective-bargaining agreement are complicated and dependent on where teams fall in revenue sharing. But here are the important parts: The Royals will receive a compensatory, or additional, draft pick following the first round if a player declines a qualifying offer and signs a contract of more than $50 million. If the players declines the qualifying offer and signs for less than $50 million, the compensation pick will come after Competitive Balance Round B, which follows the second round.

Overall I was pretty disappointed with this conclusion of the Royals era of Hosmer, Moustakas, and Cain. I will remember this season for what could have been. Had the Royals not had a historically bad start nor a terrible August they could have had a place in the playoffs. Alas it wasn’t to be. Will be interesting what the team will look like next season and who goes where. For me the team MVP was Merrifield.

Set to one side that the reason most Americans can sing the words to their national anthem is that for generations, every American attending a professional baseball game has stood to look at the flag while someone sings “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Many Americans think the last words of the national anthem are “Play ball!”

Baseball is about baseball. The NFL and NBA seem to be about more things than I can process—some of them political, some of them personal.